UH Manoa Campus Events Calendar

Words in the World: Literatures, Oratures, and New Meeting Grounds

The WORDS IN THE WORLD: LITERATURES, ORATURES, AND NEW MEETING GROUNDS symposium, is being held at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa from February 7 to February 9, 2013, featuring speakers including Albert Wendt, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Pualani Kanaka‘ole Kanahele, Kimo Keaulana, Hosam Aboul-Ela, Francesca Orsini, and Chantal Spitz.

This symposium has its impetus in the movement within literary, cultural, and performance circles to reconceptualize the field of “world literature.” Working from a location in Hawai‘i and Oceania, the symposium pursues an alternative vision of “words in the world” that foregrounds perspectives and cultural forms from around the world that the field of “world literature” previously peripheralized. A central theme will be the need for the literatures and oratures of the world to engage indigenous aesthetic and ethical traditions of speaking from and for particular places, while developing lines of connection and affiliation among disparate communities of writers and scholars. Toward this end, the symposium brings together literary critics, performance artists, and cultural practitioners—from Hawai‘i, Oceania, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—to discuss the situations of literatures and oratures both in relation to the earth and to each other.

A practical outcome of the symposium will be a contribution to the archive of methods and pedagogical resources that study the worldliness of literature, including strategies for a new comparativism, along with reading practices elaborated from within emerging networks of literary and cultural production.

With a focus on mele Hawai‘i, the indigenous music of Hawai‘i, this panel will engage with the intersection between orature and literature, as represented by the poetry of song and chant, and performance.

This panel will engage from different locations the question of the limits of the concept of World Literature, both in terms of classroom practice and theoretical understandings of literary traditions across the world.

Rather than proposing how or why Indigenous and Pacific texts might be included in a concept of (and classes about) World Literature on the basis of the fact that these too are “part of the world,” the panelists will be invited to suggest how World Literature, Pacific, and Indigenous Literary worlds might mutually engage.

5:30 – 6:30 RECEPTION

6:30 – 7:45 Performing Arts and Decolonization

An evening of cultural sharing.

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9
at the Hālau o Haumea, Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies

This panel will discuss the impact of translation on the conceptualization and circulation of literatures and oratures in the world, historically and in the present, and ask how translation practices can contribute to resisting a globalizing pedagogy of "world literature."

In a similar spirit of an “alternative vision of words in the world,” the Student Hui seeks new and different ways to generate discussion, conversation, observations, and reflection among symposium panelists and participants through capturing reactions, questions, themes, and memories generated from the symposium.

Stay tuned for more information about this symposium on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/389065227842284/?ref=ts&fref=ts! We hope you can join us!

Ticket InformationFree and open to the public

Event SponsorDepartment of English and the Hawai‘inuiakea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, Manoa Campus